Google slashed prices on its Drive cloud storage service on Thursday in a competitive jab at start-up Dropbox and larger rivals including Microsoft.

Google said its 100 gigabyte Drive storage plan now costs $1.99 per month, down from $4.99 per month previously. The one-terabyte plan now costs $9.99 per month versus $49.99 before. The 15-gigabyte plan remains free and there’s another plan that offers at least 10 terabytes of storage for $99.99 per month, the company added in a blog post.

Dropbox, which has more than 200 million users of its cloud storage service, offers two gigabytes for free. The company’s Pro service offers 100 gigabytes of space for $9.99 a month, or $99 a year. There’s also a service for businesses which offers unlimited storage for at least five users and costs $15 per month for each user.

Google’s price reduction is the latest sign of increased competition in cloud computing, which pits the Internet search giant against start-ups like Dropbox but also other large technology companies including Amazon and Microsoft.

“Watch your back, Dropbox,” Dave Girouard, a former Google executive who built the company’s billion-dollar cloud apps business, wrote on Twitter after the announcement. A Dropbox spokeswoman declined to comment.

This is partly a game of scale and financial muscle. The company that can build the largest, most efficient data centers the quickest will be able to offer the best cloud services at the lowest prices to consumers, developers and companies.

Amazon’s cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, regularly slashing prices, a strategy which has help it grab an early lead in this fast-growing market.

Google was able to cut Drive prices so much because of “a number of recent infrastructure improvements,” Scott Johnston, director of product management, at Google Drive, said in Thursday’s blog.

Google’s approach is a reprise of its successful Gmail strategy from several years ago. The company won a lot of email users from Yahoo and Microsoft’s Hotmail service by offering massive amounts of storage for free.

Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin “always told us to design products as if storage was free,” another former Googler Hunter Walk, wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “Google Drive seems to be heading in that direction.”

Aaron Levie, head of enterprise cloud computing start-up Box, agreed. “Cloud storage will eventually be free and infinite,” he tweeted.